But while CNO, a man I have come to like and respect, warned me to be discreet, he also ordered me to get the goddamn job done. “Dick—do not fail to bring this bastard back” is what he said in his booming foghorn basso.
CNO’s choice of phrase struck a chord deep within my soul. He used virtually the same words as another CNO I respected, Admiral Black Jack Morrison.
“Dick, you will not fail,” was what Black Jack said the day he’d ordered me to design, build, equip, train, and lead the most effective and highly secret counterterror force in the world, SEAL Team Six.
Of course the world was simple in those days. There were the good guys—us, our allies, and our surrogates—and there were the bad guys—the Soviet Bear, its allies, and its surrogates. Yin and yang. Black and white. Us or them.
Yesterday’s villains were known quantities. Today’s bad guys are faceless assholes like Azziz; members of self-contained cells, or loners who say they represent some fragment of the underclass. Most often, we have no idea who they are, how they operate, or what their targets are going to be. What worried CNO and me even more was the possibility that half a dozen groups of these tangos would coalesce—form a loose syndicate and operate in concert. That would make them PDMPs—Pretty Dangerous Motherfucking People indeed.
Except, the only people who seemed to appreciate this nasty factoid were CNO and me. This, after all, was the nineties—when Americans turned inward. The polls all showed it, too. Crime. Health care. Welfare reform. Those were the popular problems to be concerned about, and the White House, which was ruled by pollsters, followed the public lead. Americans, they’d decided, couldn’t care less what was going on in places whose names they couldn’t pronounce.
And yet, CNO and I knew that what happened in those corners of the world was going to affect us in a big way. All those KGB and GRU veterans for hire. All those old Soviet nukes and chemical/biological warfare canisters. All those guns and bullets, grenades, land mines, rocket-propelled grenades, plastic explosives, and shoulder-held surface-to-air missiles—all just waiting to be used against us.
So we waged our own unconventional little war. CNO did covert combat on the Pentagon’s E-ring, where the service chiefs have their offices. He skirmished at meetings of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He staged hit-and-run strikes during day-long strategy sessions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He left behind philosophical time bombs during visits with the White House national security adviser.
On the overt side, he dropped tactical tidbits to half a dozen favored reporters and hammered the subject in all of his public appearances. He made quite a name for himself on the TV talk shows—volubly promoting the right to pursue those who murder Americans if they take flight overseas and return them to justice here, and defending the concept of counterterror—which means doing it to them before they do it to us. And every now and then, when he won his battles on the home front, I got to fight mine in places like this.
Today’s mission, for example, had been approved in the Oval Office, by the Leader of the Free World himself. Seventy-two hours before we’d gone wheels up, I was snuck into the White House through the East Wing, looking like one of the first family’s Hollywood friends—I wore Reeboks, blue jeans, and a chambray shirt, my long hair tucked under a po’ boy cap. CNO arrived through the West Wing basement entrance in a dark suit. We linked up in the NSC adviser’s office and went the roundabout route to meet the commander in chief.
It was obvious the president wasn’t happy about my mission. But CNO had worked him over pretty good. He’d explained that any indigent tango who could throw away $5 million cash in bail money and spend a grand per hour on lawyers was worth going after, if only to find out who was funding him.
More to the point—i.e., politically—he convinced the president that the only way to deter this particular genus of terrorists was to take the sort of explicitly violent, yet deniably clandestine action, which would force them to reconsider further acts of aggression within our borders. And he wasn’t about to let the president weasel out of it now: “If they perceive you as indecisive or weak, Mr. President, they’ll only hit us again,” CNO insisted. “That could jeopardize your reelection substantially.” Indeed, he gently reminded the president that virtually every foreign-intelligence profile we’d intercepted, from both allies and adversaries, made the point that the leader of the free world had been a Vietnam War protester and was probably inherently resistant to using force.
The president asked for my opinion. I told him I concurred with my boss. I added that we somehow had to show the Egyptians that they couldn’t lie to us about harboring terrorists—but that we couldn’t do it overtly.
The president nodded in agreement. He may have not had a military molecule in his body, but he was 100 percent a political animal. Instinctively, he knew there was no way we could allow a country receiving almost $3 billion in American aid to provide terrorists with a safe haven. “But isn’t there a less, ah, brutal way of convincing them, Captain?”
I was about to use the dreaded F-word when I saw the look in CNO’s eye. I bit my tongue. “No, sir. No way at all.”
The president sighed. “I still don’t like it, Admiral Secrest. But I’m gonna bow to your wisdom—and my wife’s. She insists we have to act decisively.”
It was nice to hear that someone in the White House actually has balls.
So the supreme CINC gave us his blessing, although he refused to sign a national-security finding in the matter. Well, I could see his point. It’s not the kind of mission where you want to leave a paper trail. In fact, the political aspects of this assignment were lose/lose, so far as CNO and I were concerned. If I screwed up, the White House would jettison CNO—maybe even court-martial him. If I succeeded, only CNO and the president would know what I’d done. There were no medals in this for me or my men, only the knowledge that we were doing what we were born to do, for the country we loved so much.
CNO and I left together, hustling out the West Wing into his car. We rode back to the Pentagon in silence. There’s a term for what CNO had just done. It’s called leading from the front.
I admire and respect an officer who takes the same risks as his men—and while CNO wasn’t coming with us, his ass was on the line no less than mine was. So my response to him was the same as it had been to Black Jack Morrison back in 1980.
No way would I fail. “Aye, aye, sir,” I said.
My fingers discovered something—a single strand of monofilament ran six inches above the stair tread, attached to the wall on one side and threaded through the filigree iron railing on the other. I drew the line in carefully. It was attached to a series of small, empty tin cans. What I’d discovered was the same sort of simple, effective intrusion device I’d first seen used in Vietnam. Some big-footed American trips the wire, the cans go clank-clank, and Mr. Charlie shoots you dead before you know what’s happened.
The hair on my neck stood up. If there was one, there’ll be another. These things always ran in pairs—or even triples. I stopped to let my fingers do the walking.
Bingo—monofilament number two was three steps above number one. And wire number three ran at chest level, two feet above that.
Each had to be disposed of. First, I made sure Nasty and Howie knew what, when, where, and how. Then I flipped the Emerson out of my waistband, and as Nasty took the cans into his big hands one by one, I clipped the line. Then we set them all on the landing below us. We repeated the sequence for the next two without incident.
Two apartments were on the third floor. From our surveillance, I knew Azziz lived with his mother and younger brother behind door number one—the one on the left that looked out on the back alley. Across the hallway were the bodyguards. Two at a time they accompanied Azziz whenever he left the house.
We had two options: the first was to break in and do our job without alerting the watchdogs. The second involved breaking into both apartments simultaneously, allowing Howie to wax the bodyguards while Nas
ty, Tommy, Duck Foot, and I silenced Mom and baby bro, grabbed Azziz, and skipped. I preferred option number one.
Inshallah, it was not to be.
The ever present Mr. Murphy of Murphy’s Law fame had accompanied us on this little adventure. As I came up to the third-floor landing, the right-hand door opened, spilling light down the stairwell. A shaggy-haired kid in sweats peered out, his face quizzical.
I froze, hoping he wouldn’t see me.
The expression in his eyes said otherwise. Nasty didn’t wait to be coaxed—a quiet brrp from his HK and a three-round burst took the kid down before he could react. You could hear the hollowpoint, frangible rounds impact, cracking bone and cartilage in the tango’s chest.
I bolted the last two yards and caught him before he hit the ground, took him by the shoulders, and dragged the body out onto the landing. Howie moved into the bodyguards’ flat, his HK in close-quarters-battle ready mode, his round, brown face impassive. He knew what he had to do.
Nasty and I took the left-hand door. I hit it hard enough with my foot to pop it off the hinges.
Inside. I went left. Nasty went right. There was motion at the window in front of me—Duck Foot and Tommy T coming through the shutters, right on the busted-door cue. From somewhere, a woman screamed—the cry was cut off.
Now it was all moving so fast that things happened in flash-time sequence. I hit the left-side bedroom door. Azziz rolled over, grabbing for something under the mattress. “Fuck you—” I wrestled his hand from under the mattress, breaking a finger or two in the process, and slid the pistol he’d been trying for out of reach. Then I swatted him back against the wall, covered him with my body, and applied a liberal helping of leather sap behind his ear. He went spongy.
I grabbed the roll of surgical tape in my pocket; Tommy already had his out. We trussed Azziz’s hands and feet quicker than any cowpokes ever hog-tied a dogie, then flipped him onto the floor, facedown.
We did a quick sweep of the room. I turned the mattress. There was a pistol there. And a heavy, thick, brown envelope. I grabbed it and looked inside—it was stuffed with English fifty-pound notes and a few documents. It went into my big inside pocket. Then I plucked the tango from the floor and threw him over my shoulder. It was time to get the hell out of Dodge. “Go-go-go.”
Tommy bolted toward the landing. I followed him, my left hand fumbling for the transmitter in my pocket. I finally got it, squeezed it hard, and—smaaaack—caught the edge of the bedroom door right in the middle of my forehead at full speed. I bounced backward, Azziz’s weight pulling me off my feet. His head hit the floor with a thunk as I sat down hard, stunned. Bad juju, Dickie.
“Skipper, Skipper?” Tommy wheeled, grabbed my arm, and pulled me to my feet.
“What? What?” I shook my head. It didn’t help—I still saw nothing but stars. Then I came to my senses. We were behind fucking schedule. “Go—move! I’m okay, I’m okay!” My lip was split, my nose was bleeding. But what the fuck—no pain, no … pain.
I ran back through the living room. I saw two doors leading to the hallway—double vision is one sign of a concussion. Fuck me—I picked the one on the right and managed to stagger through without hitting myself again.
Howie was already on the landing, an urgent expression on his pockmarked, copper-colored face. “We’re clear.” he said, his head inclined toward the other flat. “We’re behind sked, Skipper.”
I already knew whose fault that was—mine. I motioned for him to get his ass in gear. “Go-go-go—” Howie charged down the stairs to run interference. I followed him unsteadily, keeping as close as I could with Azziz’s inert form bouncing on my shoulder like the proverbial sack of shit. I misstepped on the ground-floor landing and turned my ankle but kept moving. I love pain—it makes me realize I’m still alive.
I came out the front door and discovered empty street. More bad juju. Doom on me. Where the hell was Wonder? I looked up and down. Nada. Nothing. You can never find a fucking taxi when you need one. I hit the call button again, praying as I did so.
There is a technical phrase for our condition: it is known as goatfucked. Think of it as a painting, entitled Five Assholes and a Tango Waiting for Shit to Happen.
Fuck that. Inaction breeds failure. “Move out.” There was a single streetlight about 150 feet to my left, casting nasty shadows. Five hundred feet behind that, the narrow, unpaved street came to a dead end. Somewhere close by, a pack of dogs howled. I started jogging to my right, hobbling toward an intersection I knew Wonder would have to pass.
I heard the growl of Duck Foot’s and Tommy T’s motorbikes. They roared past me, spitting dirt as they took point. The rest of the team fanned out in a rough diamond pattern around me. At least we’d die together.
Movement on my shoulder. Azziz woke up and started screaming in rapid Arabic. That’s all I needed. I flipped him onto the ground, applied a choker hold, and he went limp again. But not before half a dozen lights came on in half a dozen windows.
I have a vivid imagination. The things I was doing to Wonder in my head at this moment would have made Torquemada queasy. I gritted my teeth and kept moving.
We reached the intersection and jammed ourselves into a doorway, sweating. Tommy went right, Duck Foot sped off left, up the hill toward the Citadel, to search for Doc and Wonder.
It seemed like an eternity—like the endless waits during ambushes in Vietnam when I’d lie soaked and cold in the jungle waiting for Charlie to show himself. Back then, we’d sometimes wait for two or three hours. We couldn’t afford more than a couple of minutes here.
I heard a car. Lights doused, Wonder careened into the intersection and did a bootlegger’s turn, coming to a full stop fifty feet from us, his right foot pedal to the metal gunning the engine in neutral. “Yo, Dickhead—over here!”
We were at the Peugeot in less than five seconds. Doc already had the rear gate up. I hobbled up. Doc grappled Azziz by the shoulders, then Howie tossed my ass unceremoniously northward, crammed his bulk next to me, and pulled the gate shut from inside. Nasty rode shotgun, his HK on his lap. Wonder slid the wagon into gear, accelerating steadily so as not to disturb Doc, who was already popping Azziz in the upper arm with the syringe.
“What the fuck, Wonder?”
Wonder’s face turned toward me. It was bathed in sweat. “Goddamn motor died, Skipper. This piece of shit ain’t worth the bald, pus-filled tires it’s running on. Doc had to push so’s I could jump-start the cocksucker.”
I wasn’t in the mood for any goddamn excuses. “Weren’t you supposed to fix the sucker, asshole?” I pulled both sets of rear-window curtains shut, giving us some privacy. By now, Duck Foot and Tommy would be heading for the rendezvous spot we’d picked just past the Giza circle. There, we’d ditch the bikes, roll our cargo into a nice camel rug I’d bought at the Khan al-Khalil market, transfer him into the trunk of Doc Tremblay’s car, which had the luxury of diplomatie plates and a decent engine. Then we’d head both cars up to Alexandria for our exfiltration to sea en convoy.
The air was cool—midfifties—but I was still sweating buckets. My heart was pumping a steady 160 or so. My ankle ached. My lip hurt like hell. I felt my temple, where a huge, painful, spongy knot about the size of an egg had begun to materialize. I wiped the blood from my face, cleared my bloody nose on my tunic, then inhaled slowly and deeply to slow my respiration.
Was I happy? Is the Pope Polish? Do wild bears shit in the forest?
I caught Wonder staring at me in the rearview mirror, a hurt expression on his face. What the fuck, we were alive. I threw him the bird so he’d know I forgave him. He gave me an exuberant, relieved wink. I returned it with as much energy as I could muster and a hearty, “Fuck you, dipshit no-load worthless ex-Marine asshole,” which brought a broad smile to his ugly face.
Doc ran a quick check on the now comatose Azziz. He splinted the tango’s broken fingers, checked for fractured ribs, and held his eyelids open while he checked pupil dilation. When he’d finished, he
peered at my bloody features critically. “What the hell happened to you?”
I told him. He stifled a giggle and shone a penlight in my eyes. “Entiymah feeshmok—you have no brains.” He turned my face left, then right, clucking like an Arab emeq—hen. “You’ve gotta be the clumsiest son of a bitch who ever lived, y’know? You’re lucky you don’t have a friggin’ concussion.” He slipped tape and dressing out of his vest and tended to my battered features. “You know, Dick,” he said, “you’re like a gawddamn bad penny—you just keep coming back.”
“Doom on you, Doc,” I said affectionately, telling him to go fuck himself in Vietnamese. “You’re the one who’s always willing to make change.”
After he’d finished his ministrations, I knelt like a Muslim in prayer, rested my elbows on the front seat, and peered out through the windshield. We were making good time as we raced through the empty streets, snaking past the occasional lorry.
We chugged along the es-Sayala, past the Salah ed-Din mosque, and onto the el-Gami’a bridge. Just on the far side of the bridge was a broad, six-lane avenue that ran south past the university to the circle where we’d bear right and head toward the Alexandria Road.
Except, there was a roadblock halfway across the bridge. A sandbag maze had been built. I could see two machine-gun positions. Behind them sat an armored personnel carrier with 20mm cannon pointed in our direction.
“What the fuck—”
“Roving spot check.”
“Like I said, what the fuck?”
“They set these up randomly at night. Looking for fundamentalists, I guess,” Doc Tremblay said.
We were about to be clusterfucked by Mr. Murphy. Doom on Dickie.
I considered the possibilities. If we turned and ran now, we’d only draw attention to ourselves. The only thing to do was bluff our way through.
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